NEW SERVICE SPOTLIGHT: Trellis From Emerson Network Power

Emerson Network Power recently announced Trellis™, the company’s integrated, single information source data center infrastructure management (DCIM) platform designed to bridge the critical gap between a data center’s IT equipment and facilities infrastructure. The aim of the Trellis™ DCIM platform is to provide integrated, real-time visualization, analysis, and control across IT equipment and physical infrastructure.

The Trellis infrastructure optimization platform is a family of hardware, software, and services designed to manage the dynamic nature and requirements of the infrastructure holistically from a central source. This is aimed at enabling data center managers to make smarter decisions on the interplay between efficiency, availability, and capacity utilization.

“Virtualization has brought greater flexibility and efficiency to data center management, but has introduced new complexities and pressures to the static physical infrastructure,” said Steve Hassell, president of the Avocent business of Emerson Network Power. “Organizations today lack visibility into the impact of virtualization and the deployment of high density servers on the physical infrastructure, and that keeps them from utilizing the full capacity of their equipment. We intend to provide that visibility along with the tools to manage and optimize changes to the physical infrastructure.”

Currently, data center managers typically reserve 20% or more of their power system capacity as a buffer against overload. This has become a standard practice because they lack a single, real time view of operating conditions within the IT equipment and the power and cooling systems that support them, instead relying on the face-plate specifications rather than real time performance indicators. Virtualization has added to the uncertainty—and increased the size of the buffer in some cases—as it creates a dynamically shifting operating environment on a static physical layer. According to Emerson calculations, if every U.S. data center could utilize 10% more of its available capacity, U.S. businesses stand to save more than $10 billion through improved DCIM.

The Trellis platform will increase capacity utilization by providing visibility into and control over integration and collaboration between the physical and IT infrastructure layers—what Emerson Network Power calls “dynamic infrastructure optimization”—eliminating the need for guesswork that necessitates a power system capacity “buffer.”

The Trellis platform brings together the functionalities of Emerson’s existing Aperture, Avocent and Liebert DCIM Solutions.

Emerson Network Power expects the core Trellis modules to be available by Q4 2011 with subsequent modules rolling out over the following 12 to 18 months. In the meantime, managers can implement any of Emerson Network Power’s existing hardware or software solutions. Current solutions will either migrate or integrate, as appropriate, with the new Trellis platform.

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